Venice | Slowly but Surely

Scene before the press conference at the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the Venice Biennale.

VENICE — After four days here for the press preview of the 53rd International Art Biennale, I am ready to pack up my bags, get a few souvenirs, and head home.

Looking back, the week blurs into one long (long, long) day, stretching from the feverish early morning walks though the many pavilions, giardini, palazzos and former factories into wild nocturnal boat-rides to cocktails, dinners, screenings and parties. Venice really has a lot to offer — more incredible locations in a small space than you could ever imagine. But as the artist Barbara Kruger might say, “Venice is a very small town unless you have to walk it.”
Renting a speed boat — or bringing your own mega yacht as the Russian oligarchs do — is really the way to go but it comes with a price. This year the going rate for a motoscaffo was 130 euros per hour. Not a deal in dollars or in rubles. And what with the current slow-down in the art market and the world economy alike, there were fewer people in attendance at this year’s opening and fewer displays of glamour and wealth.

To say that everybody I spoke to offered up a different and contradictory opinion on the Biennale is to state the obvious, but most people would most likely agree that this one will go down as the Slow Biennale. But that is a good thing, like a wonderful International meal cooked and eaten in one of those pretentious but simple, snooty but friendly, obvious but obscure Slow Food restaurants that are the only pride of Italy these days. (Let’s not even talk about Berlusconi or the artists in the Italian national pavilion!)

The chef, young philosopher and curator Daniel Birnbaum made precise choices for the International Pavilion (a large exhibition space in the Giardini formerly known as the Italian Pavilion) and for the even larger Arsenale, showing great knowledge and discipline. The show is titled “Making Worlds,” a reference to both globalism and modes of creativity, but in my opinion, it could well be titled “Making Banquets,” as it struck me as an international and multicultural meal where all ingredients are local and natural and the artists took their time thinking about exactly what to do with them. Birnbaum paid respect to conceptual masters like John Baldessari and Yoko Ono, but the fare was not short of surprising delicacies. More than a few leftovers had been pulled out of the freezer, including forgotten artists (as in Palermo’s room), peculiar artworks (Gilbert & George’s manifesto) and even obscure movements like the Japanese collective Gutai. Birnbaum really wants his visitors to take time to savor his confections; he plays so adeptly with the flavors that more than once, a work you think you know turns out to be something else entirely. It must have been his secret pleasure to challenge the art critics and the collectors or simply his own form of cultural snobbery. For sure, it kept you engaged and made you chew thoroughly.

Were the shadows on the wall by Kara Walker? Or were they a sexed up Paul Chan scene? Or were they a fantastic work by Hans Peter Feldman? Not Walker, too obvious. Was that elaborate sculpture by Sarah Sze? Or was it a Haegue Yang? Or an installation by Moschekwa Langa? Not Sarah Sze, too predictable.

Tomas Saraceno’s “Galaxy” in the International Pavilion.

I really loved the older South American artists like Tomas Saraceno and Lygia Pape who were represented by gigantic installations that entangled viewers in their webs both physically and mentally. But I missed something bigger by Cildo Meireles. (Again, maybe too predictable.) The Indian artist Sheela Gowada, the California artist Pae White and a few others made great use of poor materials like wool, seeds, glass and urban debris to create seductive cages for the viewer. These days, I really like the idea of experiencing an artwork — passing though it, walking inside and outside of it, becoming part of it. It happened again and again, in Carsten Holler’s installation, in Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker’s installation, in Nathalie Djurberg’s enchanted greenhouse and in the global village by the Belgian artist Pascale Martine Tayou.

The cafe in the International Pavilion designed by the artist Tobias Rehberger.

A few artists even went all the way to create environments with a specific function like Tobias Rehberger’s day-glo coffee shop, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s labyrinth bookstore and Massimo Bartolini’s meeting room.

I also really loved the newly manicured Giardini della Vergine at the very far end of the Arsenale, where one early morning I found myself enchanted by a performance by the Indian artist Nikhil Chopra in a small crypt, played with the interactive sculptures by Miranda July, exercised my muscles on the rings hanging from the ceiling in William Forsythe’s space, and finally sat exhausted by the mud swamp that Laura Favaretto reconstructed as a monument to the infamous. It was not as easy as a stroll through white-walled booths hung with paintings and drawings but this is the Biennale and not the Basel Art Fair, which is the next stop on the art tour.

Nikhil Chopra working on his installation in the Giardini della Vergine.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s installation in the Arsenale.

I must admit that I was too slow to visit all of the more than 70 national pavilions and collateral exhibitions going on all around town. My feet were just not fast enough and they gave up after the Giardini Tour-du-Monde (in this small park where the major national pavilions are situated, it requires little effort to travel from Brazil to Romania, from Germany to Australia, from Japan to Greece).

In my view, three exhibitions compete magnificently for the Slow Prize. In the British Pavilion, Steve McQueen’s movie on life and death in the Giardini after the art tourists had left was impressive in its juxtaposition of the happy life of insects and roaming packs of dogs and the dubious nightlife of men meeting in the darkness. At the Goldoni theatre, Francesca von Hapsburg financed a divisively abstract opera with visuals by Cerith Wyn Evans and music by Florian Hecker that held the audience, more used to operas in the Salzburg tradition, hostage for a grand total of 41 minutes and 40 seconds. On the Island of Certosa, the Irish artist John Gerrard presented in real time computer-generated renderings of the most desolate parts of the American West including the reconstruction of a dust storm and a year in the life of an automated pig farm. A third screen showed a man slowly blacking out the facade of a white barn with an oil stick. At this rate, he is scheduled to complete his task in the year 2038.

View of the Bruce Nauman exhibition in the American Pavilion.

As expected, The Gold Lion, the real award for the best pavilion, went to The United States of Obama, this year represented by Bruce Nauman, the mentor and the hero of an entire generation of artists. In three different locations you can experience the variety and the depth of his body of work, from sculpture to neon to video. (A very slow real time video record of the life in his studio night after night is also on view at Palazzo Grassi.) His new work for the Biennale is a pair of lyrical sound installations where multiple voices repeat the days of the week over and over again in English and Italian. Walking the gauntlet of ultra thin speakers in the marble floored salon of Ca’ Foscari and stopping now and then to tune into a single voice is a unique physical experience. Exactly what I feel art should be now.

Detail of a large installation by the British bad boys Dinos and Jake Chapman at the Punta della Dogana.

To be fair to the art world-at-large and to reestablish the balance between Slow and Fast, between Birnbaum’s Biennale and Francois Pinault’s personal collection shown at the newly opened Punta della Dogana and at Palazzo Grassi, the award for best pavilion should have gone to the wildly popular Danish and Nordic Pavilions, where the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset transformed the two buildings into private homes. The Danish one was offered “for sale” with a pair of real estate agents giving tours of the rooms that had been decked out with works borrowed from some of the artists’ favorite artists. Elmgreen & Dragset’s cleverness and humor and the lifestyles of their imaginary art-collecting inhabitants — a broken up bourgeois family with solid conservative tastes and their neighbor, a gay writer who surrounds himself with homosexual art and real life naked rent-boys — were the talk of the town. It was Fast Art at its best, a bright, funny moment that reflected on the state of the art world. It was not the only such moment, however. The decidedly naughty John Wesley retrospective presented by the Fondazione Prada on the Island of San Giorgio was just the thing for those looking for a bit of titillation and a dose of contemporary Pop culture. At the opening, the fashion designer Marc Jacobs and his boyfriend Lorenzo Martone met the oligarch Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova at the court of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. The irony of the whole situation was not lost on the other attending artists and superstars, including Rem Koolhaas, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky and Francesco Vezzoli. Miuccia Prada had made a very fast move, surprising everybody with her choice of Wesley, an 82-year-old outsider.

Indeed, outside of the walls of the Giardini, life in Venice moved at a faster pace. Let’s take Thursday evening as a case study. After a full eight-hour day of art watching, there was the official Red Carpet opening for the Punta della Dogana Gallery, the Wim Delvoye cocktail at the Guggenheim Museum, the Goldoni Theatre Opera premiere, the exclusive dinner on the Missoni boat for Bruce Nauman, the sand and beach party for the Ukrainian curator Peter Doroshenko and after many pit- (or pee-) stops at the Bauer Hotel, the final rave party organized for the Nordic pavilion at the beautiful Fascist 1930s private airport on the Lido where a thousand people where still dancing on the illuminated tarmac to loud house music into the wee hours of the morning.

Suffice it to say that the slowness of the days spent in the rooms of the Biennale felt like a pleasure rather than a duty.

For the record, the best souvenirs from Venice were the free postcards by the artist Aleksandra Mir depicting all manner of banal tourist destinations, none of them Venice.